Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. You and three friends are in the back room of a tavern. Since this is the thirteenth century, there isn’t any electricity; the space is lit by half a dozen candles. In the next room there is an elephant, but none of you have seen such a beast before. Though you’ve all heard conflicting tales about elephants, none of you know exactly what one looks like. You’re all determined to find out what this lauded animal is, but the room’s big enough to fit only one of you at time. One by one you go inside. The thing is, you have to go in blindfolded.

With eyes covered, the first friend enters. After a while, he returns.

The room was too dark to see the elephant, he says, and the blindfold didn’t help. Therefore, he felt for the animal with his hands, which he’s now stretching wide. “An elephant is long, thin, and flexible,” he reports, “like a rope.”

That’s not like the elephants I’ve heard of, you think to yourself.

The second person takes the blindfold and goes in. You hear the sounds of him navigating the wall. He reemerges.

“An elephant is broad, lightweight, and flops when I hold it,” he says. “It must be a fan.”

The first friend defends his claim that an elephant is like a rope, not a fan. The second one insists that an elephant is floppy by nature. The conversation between the two does not move toward a resolution.

Wanting to put an end to the matter, a third friend enters the room, comes back, and then shouts: “No! An elephant is broad, thick, and heavy, just like a great temple pillar!”

Neither of the first two explorers is impressed.

The time has come for you to take the elephant into your own hands.

You walk into the dark room, wondering why you had to put a blindfold on—it seems redundant.

No matter: you hear the rustle of a large animal, though you can’t place what exactly is making the noise. You feel a great heat, but you can’t tell where it is coming from. The air that hits your nose is foul. You reach your hand out for this elephant, and it lands on something narrow that flops about like a reed in the wind. An elephant, it seems, is something like a stiff, strange, smelly snake.

Walking out, you report the reedlike reading of the elephant to your friends, who disagree with you into the night.

WHAT WERE YOU FEELING AT?

This story is an old one. Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and Sufis all tell versions of it. In our telling, the first friend felt the elephant’s trunk; the second, its ear; the third, its knee; and you, dear investigator, felt the great beast’s tail (and smelled its generous backside). Like all the best tales, this one has many interpretations.

We’ll focus on one reading, as told by the Sufi poet-saint Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi.¹ You and your friends each represent the way a person accesses reality—what we usually refer to when we say “the truth”: every person, every culture, and every nation, encounters the elephant in the room differently. While this has many implications, let’s focus on what it means for an enterprise. First, all of us are pretty ignorant regardless of the education and experiences we’ve had. The quickest way to work around our own unique sets of ignorance is to have the trust and counsel of people who know things we don’t—some people access the truth as an elephant’s ear, others as its tail. As people trying to do meaningful work, dare we say truthful work, we need as many good hands on the elephant as possible.

You also can think of each friend as a different discipline, and each touches a different aspect of the elephant in question. Is one more valid than the others? Probably not. So how would you get a better idea of the nature of an elephant? By combining ideas, perspectives, and skills—by cooperating. To understand the elephant in the room, we have to partner together.

ON PARTNERSHIP

Each person—as well as each discipline—accesses the world through his or her own perspectives, carrying narratives and baggage he or she does or doesn’t see. Our upbringings, our education, and our vocations shape us as we shape them. This snowflakelike individuality showcases how a unique potential lives within each person but also a unique ignorance; we cannot escape our own perspectives. That is why if we want to do good work, particularly if we want to innovate, we need to have other, trusted hands on the elephant.

We need to have people with us who can touch the elephant and be able to communicate their experience. No matter what your analytical capability, the power of your intuition, or the extent of your erudition may be, you cannot get around your gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and other inborn factors, all of which limit your understanding. You can have only one hand or, if you’re lucky, two hands on the elephant. To do great work, we need many more. We need a team.

This chapter investigates how we can combine our efforts to understand this elephant called working life. We’ll discuss what we refer to as partnerships: the relationships that allow people to do their best work. We’ll also investigate how to act in a way that benefits all the parties involved. To help us accomplish these ambitions, we’ll discuss the evolutionary history we bring into working life, articulate the aspects of work culture that hinder partnerships, and take inventory of the keystones to building partnerships. But before we get to that, let’s discuss partnership and why it’s so crucial to continual innovation.

THE PARTNERSHIP PRINCIPLE

A partnership is a bond, a mutual investment, a relationship, a voluntary collaborative agreement. Partnerships are crucial because as leadership scholar Don Peppers writes, trust is a lubricant for transactions. We no longer work in an era in which we try to make everything as efficient as possible; rather, we’re trying to be more agile and more innovative, to move more quickly with our iterations. Relationships are the bandwidth within an organization, which means we need to be deliberate in forming them.

It looks like we are at an organizational inflection point, with the early adopters beginning to structure their workplaces around relationships that promote wellness—in all the meanings of the phrase. We’ll expand on how to holistically structure an organization later in the book; for now, let us focus on how our human interactions inform our flourishing. To do this, we’ll need to take a deep look at what’s happening psychologically within our business lives, for our patterns of interaction long predate capitalism.

REPTILES AND MAMMALS

We use the phrase office culture to describe many things. Regardless of the slogans plastered on the walls, the actual ambience of a place arises from the interactions that happen there. If we’re not aware of our actions, we unknowingly create patterns of behavior that might or might not be healthy without being able to reflect on them. Thankfully, psychology provides a range of mirrors. Let’s look at the evolutionary one.

Consider reptiles and mammals. Which group has shown itself to be more innovative? Although we may be biased because of our hair and our milk and all, it seems safe to say that mammals are more innovative than their scaly counterparts. There’s a reason that crocodiles, after their millions of years on the planet, didn’t use tools the way we apes do; plus we have the uncanny ability to rear young, coexist in social groups and, rather crucially, share knowledge.

Yet if you’ve been to an office full of Internet-addled workers, you might find that the people there are less like their ape cousins that pick the bugs out of one another’s hair and more like alligators that eat their young on an impulse. Who, then, would develop more interesting products, the mammals or the reptiles?

You’ve probably heard the phrase lizard brain bandied about as a way of explaining the different stages of evolution that are present in our human minds. The research of Stephen Porges,² the former director of the Brain-Body Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago, helps us to refine our understanding.

Porges has been instrumental in the development of evolutionary neurophysiology: he is the originator of the polyvagal theory, a way of helping us understand the literal connection between the brain and the heart. According to Porges, consciousness is a system of interlocking levels, each reflecting a different stage of our evolution. That’s why at a deeply foundational level—so basic that it’s outside the range of perception—a part of you is constantly, vigilantly looking out for danger. Other, more contemporary parts of the nervous system have higher order tasks: relating to others, planning for the future, inventing tools, and the like. The reptilian mind protects, the mammalian mind connects.

Two activities fundamental to bringing about innovation—working together and entertaining new ideas—can happen only when our reptilian part deems the situation to be safe. You’re not going to be able to be reflective about the past, predictive of the future, or mindful of the present if a prehistoric part of you thinks there’s a predator around. Even if you’re not conscious of it, you’ll be limited to acting like a reptile. Why? Because that reptilian mind is mostly concerned with keeping you alive. Whether you’re aware of it or not, a level of your consciousness is vigilantly looking out for anything that might be going awry, and without that sentry sense detecting a threshold of security, Porges says, you won’t be able to relate closely to people or work creatively. Notice yourself if you have source-unknown vibrations or loud ventilation shafts in your office and contrast your state of mind and productivity with times when there are pleasant sounds around you. That ventilation shaft rumble upsets the reptilian mind, which orients our disposition to protecting ourselves—and makes us less apt to be prosocial or creative.

DO YOU WORK WITH MAMMALS OR REPTILES?

Think about the reptile way of life. You’re profoundly alone. No one is around to look out for you. What would it be like to work with such beings? What would the organization look like? How would working in it feel? A reptilian corporate style, Porges tells us, is embedded in defense and fear. You experience life as scarcity; there’s never enough resources to make you secure, and the furthest you’ll project into the future is to predict whether you’ll survive the day. A reptilian office has a tough time creating because fear hamstrings innovation. Why? Because if you’re a reptilian manager, you’ll take anything original that your direct reports do as volatility. The novel is not to be trusted, for the new will be read as a sign of danger.

A mammalian habitat will have a different ambience. Management will acknowledge that everyone is in it together, Porges says, and make the workplace safe for the collective. Since their working lives feel consistent, stable, and secure, volatility can arise skillfully, in the form of bold thinking, which would cause a panic in a more scaly system. This lends a greater basis to Flaubert’s excellent line about the creative process: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” This is why mammals are better innovators. If you want people to just act, act, act, scaring them can be useful for short-term productivity, but if you want them to make better products, you have to quash any sense of a zero-sum culture.

Since innovation, as the pyrotechnic language we use to describe it suggests, is an unpredictable and highly volatile pursuit, at a base level our minds read it as “danger.” It makes sense, then, that humans who are already experiencing elements of danger, whether in the form of lack of job security, emotionally abusive management, or imprisonment by metrics, aren’t able to handle the additional volatility implied in experimentation, exploration, or any of the other vulnerability-making drivers of innovation. Thus, the safer we make the workplace, the more we can make combustible ideas. If we want our people to make stuff explode, we need to give them a safe place to do it.

A lot of that safety has to do with time.

WHAT TIME IS IT?

About a hundred years ago a French philosopher was the toast of the English-speaking world: Henri Bergson. His thought reached, affected, and reflected the corners of Parisian culture, informing all things from the stream-of-consciousness novel to impressionist painting. He once quipped that the duty of the philosopher is to make the implicit into the explicit, articulating an emphasis on articulation that we aspire to ourselves. As the wise often do, Bergson reevaluated the most fundamental things, such as time. Beyond the aphorisms, he had a profound and unique understanding of the nature of time. He criticized “clock time” as being tyrannical and imprecise. It might be useful for scientific research, he thought, but not for living life. Rather, a more precise notion of time is what is best left untranslated. He thought of time as dureé, which could be translated as “time,” though you may clumsily translate it as “duration.” Instead of time being this thing on the wall or on the watch, time is your ongoing fluid experience, your consciousness.³

If we use Bergson’s lens to understand these things, we can conclude that management of tasks is actually management of time, which is actually management of consciousness. That is, when you’re trying to get people on the same schedule (or not), you’re actually talking about managing their consciousness, their experience of life, which is really quite the thing, isn’t it?

Revolting against the tyranny of clock time is not just for impressionist-era philosophers. It’s also for modern-day ultradoers such as Bob Pozen, who once simultaneously served as president of Fidelity Investments, taught a full course load at Harvard Business School, and penned articles for the Harvard Business Review. In one such piece he contends that a bias toward valuing workers by the hours they put in, which studies have shown managers do, is exceptionally misguided.⁴ To Pozen, professionals aren’t valuable to a company for the hours that they put in—which engenders a culture privileging “face time”—but for the “value they create through their knowledge.” Since the measure of worth is too often hours rather than results, Pozen says, managers distract their workers from the most critical question—Am I currently using my time in the best possible way?—and so use their time inefficiently.

Let’s expand his argument to a philosophical level. By privileging hours over results, we distract ourselves from asking if we’re using our minds in the best possible way, resulting in a culture that is only accidentally mindful, if it is at all. Orienting our working lives around the hours we put in is a way of avoiding the responsibility of using our consciousness and our energy in the best possible way. Orienting ourselves toward the end product—which is part of having a sense of purpose—and the present process helps us be more rigorous with the way we align our experiences with our outcomes. What’s wondrous about working in an organization is that there is a whole bunch of consciousnesses involved among the many people who are alive and thinking and feeling and having fears and insights and pressures and triumphs.

One of the foundational steps, then, toward working in a prosocial, commitment-oriented, mammalian way is to recognize that the people we’re working with have also had long experience with life—experiences that we haven’t had—that will yield insights we can’t have. To paraphrase the author and diarist Anaïs Nin, each person represents a world, and if we are here to do work that changes the world, we need the people we work with to share their experiences. Yet this requires a rhythm of both working in a group and working alone.

As Pozen suggests, a lot of guarding your time comes down to being able to say no and express priorities, which means that you need to have a culture that’s comfortable with open conversation and hearing “no, actually, I can’t do that.” If you are going to have an adaptable organization, the people need to be able to adapt. If the people are going to adapt, they need to be able to control their time, the way they employ their consciousness. To do that, they need to be able to communicate. When that open communication of needs exists, we can move more closely into shared endeavor, into partnership.⁵

HOW EINSTEIN MANAGED TIME

Relentless Innovation author Jeffrey Phillips favors a possibly apocryphal line from Einstein. The story is that Einstein was asked how he would tackle a particularly tough problem—saving the world, in some tellings—if he had only an hour to do so.⁶ Einstein’s approach? He’d spend 55 minutes defining the problem and 5 minutes solving it. That is, Phillips says, just about the opposite of what executives normally do. He paints a picture of harried execs deciding immediately on a solution, launching into its implementation, and then cooling down with email. It’s all task, task, task—symptomatic of a work culture that’s getting too busy to innovate, that’s become infatuated with efficiency. We might be doing with our time, but are we developing?

As Phillips argues, our busyness begets “a foreshortening of time”: we are habitually busy, and so we focus on the next activity, the next day, and the next fire rather than giving time to issues that require deep concentration. Being mired in tasks becomes the normal thing to do. This is what happens when the quantitative has a stranglehold on the qualitative, when we don’t understand the ways the matryoshka dolls nest inside one another. As Einstein’s quote suggests, the framing of the question is an outsized portion of the solution-finding process. And as Clay Christensen told us, when you ask the right question, the answer becomes mechanical. Clearly, we need to be privileging that question-framing process, which has a rhythm of introspection and collaboration, throughout our processes.

Who knows how to create space for thought? With its emphasis on having a “palette of place” for choosing an environment for the work that is most suitable, the furniture manufacturer Steelcase gives its team the flexibility to recognize when they need to protect their time and dive uninterrupted into deep-thinking problems.⁷ This can be as simple as being able to choose to work from home rather than in the office. Why? If you need to dive deeply into your work, stepping away from the office and into your home or into a third space such as a café works well. Your environment is a tool; just as you need the right tool for the job, you’d do well to find the right environment for the job. Fabrica, a production company with Benetton, shows this as well: it outfitted its Italian villa—yes, that’s where employees work—to have both thoroughly connected spaces and spaces that are purposefully without a wireless signal. Fabrica’s CEO, Dan Hill, notes that just as “noise is meaningless without quiet, connectivity becomes meaningless when pervasive.”⁸ Steelcase and Fabrica show that it is possible to create a work culture that accommodates the presence of absence.⁹ It also shows that part of partnership is allowing people to find the environments that allow them to do their best work and providing the alignment and resources that allow them to do so autonomously, which we’ll discuss at length in the middle section of this book.

TIME, STIMULATION, AND SUCCESS

Leslie Perlow has spent her career researching the microdynamics of work. Once a management consultant, she has moved into academia and is now a professor of leadership at Harvard Business School. She recently authored Sleeping with Your Smartphone, a book that distills the insights she gleaned while researching the perpetually swamped Boston Consulting Group. Her research shows how even the most extreme work cultures can change their behavior.¹⁰

How can you spot an extreme work culture? It is one where people declare themselves to be “addicts” or are recognized as such, where the label “workaholic” is worn like a badge of courage and to appear otherwise is to appear lazy, unproductive, and not team-oriented. From reading Perlow’s work and speaking with her, we came to agree with her realization that the high achievers she studied were not addicted to the work they did but prized the feelings of success and validation they gained from it, such as the momentary satisfaction of a beeping phone. We’re not addicted to success, but to validation. We are creatures of—and victims of—our feedback loops.

Recognizing this, Perlow helped BCG revise its feedback loops. In one of the teams she was studying, an agreement was made that all the team members would have one night off a week when they wouldn’t do any work—not even glance at their phones even if a big deliverable appeared for the next day. That was the agreement. To reinforce that bond of behavior, feedback shifted accordingly: instead of employees coming in and being told “good job” if they worked late into their night off, they’d get a slap on the wrist for going against the team’s agreement. After a time, team members could turn off without the itch to check in.

But this kind of change doesn’t happen by means of sloganeering. Imagine the resentment that would build if a team leader walked into a weekly meeting and shouted, “Everyone’s getting a night off!” Instead, to make this kind of shift happen, we need to take a more subtle tack.

Instead of putting everyone in a room and saying, “Now we’re going to talk about taking more time off,” you begin a discussion about what’s the biggest bugbear for a team. It could be unpredictability—as in the case of BCG—or it could be having days of endless meetings. Then bring the discussion to a point of mutual agreement on how to deal with that problem; it could be a night fully unplugged, or it could be a meeting-free day of working from home. Then make sure that solution is measurable: you’ll know if you didn’t unplug or if you did have a meeting. By opening up the discussions, finding a solution, and recording its implementation, Perlow says, we don’t just get a grip on tracking the work people do but can reflect on the way work gets done. This is a way for everybody in the group to find and exchange feedback, which in turn allows the team members to understand the way other team members work.

Perlow, Pozen, Bergson, and Porges all help us see similar points: to work closely together is to respect one another’s time and respect one another’s consciousness. Of course, our consciousness feels overwhelmed a lot of the time. This is another reason the bonds of partnership are so important: the way we get through the trials of professional life is not only by training ourselves to take better care of ourselves individually—which mindfulness is so powerful in helping us do—but by relying on one another. As we’ll explore further in the following chapters, one of the primary predictors of success for a team is the quality and quantity of the human connections that the people have. We call these deep connections partnerships.

KEYSTONES TO BUILDING PARTNERSHIPS

Success begins with people. To better take care of yours, review the following principles.

Be Honest

This is the best and only policy in communicating with a potential customer, client, colleague, employee, supplier, distributor, contractor, or even industry rival. It’s the same policy whether you’re speaking face-to-face, across the board table, or via text or tweet. You must be honest with yourself, your audience, and your mission. It’s easy to insulate ourselves from the truth—thus the emphasis on authenticity in Chapter 2. Effective leaders must be honest in order to create trust and respect from their teams and anyone they encounter. Be good to people, for business is a lifelong endeavor and you never know who you will have to rely on or turn to in the future.

Be Direct

Direct communication leads to direction, the path you set as a leader. Nobody wants to follow a muddled message even if that were possible. Every word must be deliberate and directed. Don’t be tempted to reach out without direction because that can deter or even destroy your overall agenda. If you can’t say something clearly and directly, wait until you can articulate it to yourself. Talk may be cheap, but it can be worthless if uttered without direction and even cost you a client, a deal, or your whole business. A direct message is priceless: as William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White write in their timeless Elements of Style, every word must tell.

Think Ahead

No matter how successful you are, you won’t continue on that golden path if you stop anticipating what’s next, which is a job too big to do on your own. You need to surround yourself with forward thinkers. Make sure your people are ready for changes, even the most unprecedented challenges. Think back to Schumpeter’s explosions and the interconnectedness of our many enterprises: changes are constant. Since you can know that what you’re doing today will be wrong tomorrow, you need to forge trusting, resilient teams, a constellation of partnerships.

Inspire and Influence

The most successful leaders are able to inspire and influence everyone: their executive team, employees, customers, clients, partners, investors, and many others. Inspiration cannot happen without clear communication. You have to show people you’re a person too. Success can quickly inflate egos to the point of isolation of leadership and alienation of those who are most critical to your ongoing ability to survive and thrive. The best and brightest will be toppled if they can’t inspire others. It takes a dynamic person with a positive, honest, forward-looking attitude to inspire and influence the people involved in building and growing enterprises and communities.

Create a Community

Like any community, a healthy business ecosystem must be nurtured to achieve continual success. A sustainable ecosystem is the structure you form around your organization. Those interconnections allow you to bring in individuals and groups, exposing you and your team to ideas and perspectives you wouldn’t have encountered otherwise, allowing for cross-pollination. The interoperability enables collaboration, whether with your neighbors, your office counterparts, or potential customers across the world. You must always be open to inviting new people into your extended enterprise, for potential never ends.

Think Long Term

Focusing on quarterly earnings is a diversion from the long-term picture, which includes the overall health of a company, cash flow, and the ability to stay in business. Although it may feel counterintuitive, to thrive within a volatile world, leaders must be aware of the present moment while simultaneously setting their sights on long-term goals: purpose must be a part of the present. Since value creation is qualitative as well as quantitative, no metric can completely capture success. Volatility isn’t to be avoided; it’s to be cooperated with, which requires the resilience provided by mindfulness and the buoyancy provided by partnership.